Clownmommy

December 17 was the Deadline for Families to Return Middle School Choice Applications in All Districts.  We turned in the forms and after that there was nothing we could do.  So we had Christmas and we had New Years.  Now the kids are back in school and the respite is over.  I got an e-mail from the Good Public School in Manhattan with open enrollment that My Kid had been assigned an interview appointment on this coming Friday.  I have received a letter from the Best Brooklyn Gifted and Talented School assigning my kid a date and time for her audition and I have gone on the website of the Manhattan Gifted School to sign up for a date and time to take their personalized IQ test.  We’re in the thick of it again.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to see Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch play A Little Night Music before it closes.  To watch mature women take the stage with such skill is a gift.  I was eager to get home to compare today’s program to the one from the Catherine Zeta-Jones Angela Langsbury version I saw last year.  Elaine Stritch brought her own conductor with her.  I have Stephen Sondheim’s new book and I want to read all about the creation of this show which is so tightly constructed that the actresses had the freedom to own their parts.  So much skill.  So much talent.  I’m so glad I saw it.

WOW!
Just saw the film Up In The Air for the first time.
Didn’t expect…
So subtle.
So real.
So “of the moment”.
No wonder it was such a presence at the Academy Awards last year.
and
the George Clooney character who reminds me of my brother (as well as the Jason Bateman character and/or actor who also reminds me of my brother) lives in Omaha–
where I was born!

It’s a good movie.

If you live in New York or LA…

It’s a good picture of the rest of the country—you know, the flyover states.

But the movie is even more than that.  The movie is the same story as The Velveteen Rabbit.

Santa brought My Kid a rola bola!!!

As soon as My Kid woke up this morning she wanted to check the NORAD site to find out where Santa was.  He was in Japan.   Then he was in Korea.  When we checked back later he was in Africa.

As he approached South America she began to be uncharacteristically interested in going to bed.

Wonder what that’s all about…

Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young singing Willow Pinkett-Smith’s “Whip My Hair” song was one of the funniest things I have ever seen performed.

Why???

Because…

It took me two more days to realize that the reason I found it so funny was because Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young + Willow Pinkett-Smith’s bubble-gum pop song = a perfect expression of the very particular segment of Brooklyn in which I live my everyday life.

Ended up at Barnes and Noble on Court Street.  While waiting for My Kid to finish in the children’s section, I read many embarrassingly resonating pages in the book: Stuff White People Like.

A couple of hours later I was at a Holiday Party, in a Brooklyn Brownstone, hosted and attended by exactly those people described by Christian Lander.

Lovely people talking about liberal arts and performance and teaching and real estate–my tribe…

Or not…

Came home to…

New news: another IT friend laid off…

Damn!

This morning after the in class demonstrations and shadow boxes and power point presentations, we ended up at Tazza for coffee.  The other mother, one of the ones who was so worried, said hello.  We talked about real estate.  We talked about schools.

We talked about the process made us into emotional wrecks.  Maybe it was Christmas and maybe it wasn’t  On the day we turned in the applications, I teared up for no reason when I was Rockefeller Center.

Then, later that day…

When My Kid, and the rest of her Girl Scout Troop, were singing Christmas Carols for the residents of an assisted living home…

The man, who must have been eighty years old, talked so fondly about his favorite elementary school teacher and what he learned and then he sang for us…

The children sang: I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas and the tears filled my eyes.

Hanging by a thread,

We mothers…

Inhaling for the first time,

on the day the middle school applications had to be turned in.

Fear and relief and resignation.

We laughed hysterically with tears running down our cheeks, outside, standing on the sidewalk, for a minimal joke.  We needed to laugh.

There are still many months of the process to go before we know where our children will go to school next fall.

Red and white peppermint-striped fingernails.

Mistletoe.

Elf hat.

Green eye-shadow.

Red lipstick.

Frown.

I came home really excited tonight.  Two reasons.  One; the character I am doing at the New York Downtown Clown revue is coming along and has potential, if only for that one particular venue–which is all I ever envisioned for that particular character…

Also,

In the bar after, a long and involved conversation with someone who has recently discovered clown.  And, somehow, I felt like an elder statesman imparting the knowledge from my years of experience…

Hmmmm….

I wonder what that could mean.

Am I smart or am I just old???